NiJeL has the privilege of attending the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative 2009 Action Summit at the Center for Government and International Studies this week in Cambridge, MA. We will be presenting NiJeL at the Tech Fair on Friday and Saturday along with most of the other members of the Crisismappers group who met last Fall – Development Seed, Global Relief Technologies, InSTEDD, Microsoft Humanitarian Systems, and Ushahidi. JD and I will be trading off talking about NiJeL with attendees and attending the talks. 

The introductory day today started with a summary of each the working groups and ended with two fascinating talks by Dr. Carmen Huckel Schneider of Centre for International Studies/Peace and Conflict Research at the University of Tuebingen in Germany and Dr. Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of THE LANCET. 

Throughout the working group presentations I picked up on both subtle and loud calls for more crowdsourcing, organized field-level real-time data acquisition, and spatial representation of the data. The focus is on humanitarian health issues. It was stressed that technology solutions need to be familiar and relevant to community members in the field – and this means mobile phones. As one presentation noted, there are more people in the world today with a cell phone than without one. The head of the Applied Technology for Humanitarian Action working group stressed the need for real-time, GIS based decision making solutions that are open-source and emphasis application over advocacy. This was music to our ears.

One interesting quote from the day – “Poverty is about not being able to read and write while others write about you”.